Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Genuine progressive ideology --- and by that I mean Marxist-infused social justice redistributionism and nihilist anti-morality --- is the contemporary evil of the modern political world. Make no mistake, Councillor Collin Brewer's comments, discussed at the post above, we're frankly depraved. But considering the left's abortion holocaust alone, as just one example, they were quite tame.

I'm personally horrified by much of what counts as "progressive" politics. It's taken me a long time to truly understand how deeply corrupted society is by the disease of leftism. I don't know how we turn things around, how we help young people realize that their interests are harmed by the Kool-Aid of radicalism, but whatever the answer, it's a program of civic renewal that should be the cause of any real conservative activist.

Folks should read Neo-Neocon's outstanding piece at PJ Media from a week or so back, "Why Do Some Liberals Become Conservatives?" Unlike other accounts of political transformation (change) from left to right --- and recall that Cinnamon Stillwell's, "The Making of a 9/11 Republican," remains the best --- Neo-Neocon (a.k.a. Jean Kaufman) offers an explanation based on cognitive consistency theory:

Rarely, if ever, are prospective changers actually seeking change. In fact their previous political positions on the left may be quite firmly and strongly held, and they would probably consider anyone quite mad who had the audacity to inform them of the transformation about to take place.

But although they may not be interested in change, change is interested in them. It usually begins with something external, some new information encountered seemingly by accident, something that starts to bug the person because it contradicts or doesn’t fit easily into his or her pre-existing framework. It’s like a buzzing fly that won’t quit and can’t be ignored. It causes discomfort, a sense of unease, and the disequilibrium that comes from the dilemma known as cognitive dissonance.

It’s such an unpleasant experience that people are usually eager to resolve it. How they do that is one point at which changers split off from non-changers. The latter group, if faced with that very same information, might just swat that fly — that is, in their discomfort at the knowledge that seems incongruous with their previous beliefs, they would either discredit the new information, minimize it, rationalize it, or shut it out entirely, thus ending the discomfort and the dilemma.

But those who ultimately end up as changers can’t seem to put it away that easily. For them, something once seen cannot be unseen. Perhaps they have a different habit of mind to begin with, one more accustomed to challenging its own beliefs and assumptions, one more uncomfortable with contradictions.

That model theorizes something of an abrupt shift in ideology triggered by an event that jars an individual's sense of consistency. But that's not always how people change ideological positions. In contrast, for example, gradual change is consistent with the idea of politics as a life-long learning process. People become set in their ways. And hence, people become conservative in terms of doing things a "right" way. People might think they're "liberal" in their youth, but they realize they're quite traditional in a number of respects, especially regarding thrift, morality and personal enterprise. In my case, I thought I was "liberal" into my 30's. My dad especially was a New Deal Democrat and a black American who instilled the values of the civil rights movement in me and my sisters. But the Democrat Party of today bears little resemblance to the party of the middle 20th century. The notion of centrism here might apply, for while Democrats have always been concerned about using government to shift resources to those with less, the left today is an explicitly statist, far-left anti-capitalist tendency bereft of the moral epistemology of America's founding. The left today is at the least a movement toward (European-style) socialist democracy and more likely a movement toward a (Utopian) proletarian revolution through a re-engineering of society (i.e., popular entertainment and the mass media) and the corruption of the cultural institutions of the state (i.e., public education). I was always conservative in terms of personal responsibility, honesty, and hard work. When I realized that most people on the left didn't share those values I knew that I was no longer a Democrat. Most of all, the left's stab-in-the-back on the Iraq war sealed the deal and I became an activist for truth. Throw in becoming a parent and basically experiencing a religious awakening (in the personal sense of objective truth), I found out once and for all that everything I'd come to believe about "leftist morality" and being a "liberal" was stupid.

Progressives are evil. (Remember, "liberals" aren't liberal.) Nothing brought the truth home on that count more than blogging over this last 7 years. People know my battles with leftist ghouls and their program to destroy decent people on the right. The culture of death Bob writes about is seen in all of the manifestations of collectivist harassment, stalking, and lies. As I've said many times, leftists would actually murder their conservative opponents if they could get away with it. One of the main reasons conservatives should never cave on gun rights is some day they might need firearms to guard against the tyranny of a progressive majority that's captured the state. (It's not just state power that's a threat, but progressive majoritarian redistributionist state power.) Seriously. Patriots need to bear arms against socialists who want to deprive them of life, liberty and property through the corrupted power of the collectivist state. Nothing can stand in the way of this, from the left's ideological perspective, because it's truly totalitarian in its goal to eradicate all sources of resistance. Death then becomes part of the progressive agenda, as we've seen from Stalin to Pol Pot to Che Guevara. Liberals have no values --- they must make gods of men --- because their ungodly campaign of death and destruction demands it. There can be no other way for collectivists.